National Pastime: How Americans Play Baseball and the Rest of the World Plays Soccer

When British soldiers in Afghanistan and Southern Iraq wanted to befriend the locals, they played a soccer match. On Christmas Day, 1914, British and German soldiers in the First World War did the same thing. For nearly 100 years soccer has united a divided world with only one notable exception—the United States.

Baseball is America’s game, a national obsession that remains largely North American. Soccer is the world’s game, a sport over which no nation can claim ownership. In July’s eBook of the Month, authors Stefan Szymanski and Andrew Zimbalist offer the first in-depth, cross-cultural comparison of these two great sporting passions and show how much the traditions of each game reveal about the societies and economies that spawned them. By tracing the evolution of both sports, Szymanski and Zimbalist identify some of the problems each faces, and how each sport can look to the other for solutions.

Designed to increase awareness of online resources and highlight the value of your eBook collection, July’s eBook of the Month is provided through the generous support of Brookings Institution Press. Don’t miss this unique opportunity to showcase your NetLibrary collection by sharing this engaging and entertaining look at the world of sports business.

If you use Google Scholar on campus, http://scholar.google.com, you’ll find that if your search results include articles in periodicals that Maryville owns, you’ll have a Check Maryville link available to you which will link you to the details of Maryville’s library holdings, and possibly even the full text of the article, when available.

Google Scholar is Google’s special search engine designed to index scholarly/research materials on the web. Scholar’s own links will often lead you to expensive pay-per-article sources, but in almost all cases, the Library can obtain a free copy for you through our ILLiad system instead.

For more information about Google Scholar and the Maryville links from it, please contact Melissa Belvadi, x9531.